Providing some practical perspective, Cisco points out
that 6.6 zettabytes is equivalent to:

92 trillion hours of streaming music - Equivalent to about 1.5
years of continuous music streaming for the world's population in
2016.

16 trillion hours of business Web conferencing - Equivalent to
about 12 hours of daily Web conferencing for the world's workforce
in 2016.

7 trillion hours of online high-definition (HD) video streaming
- Equivalent to about 2.5 hours of daily streamed HD video for the
world's population in 2016.

According to Cisco, the vast majority of this traffic is
invisible to end users-it's traffic that's part-and-parcel of data
center and cloud-computing workloads. Roughly 76% of data center
traffic will actually stay within the data center and "will be
largely generated by storage, production and development data,"
Cisco says.

Another 7% will be generated between data centers, driven primarily
by data replication and software/system updates. The remaining 17%
will be from end users accessing clouds for Web surfing, email and
video streaming.

"This year's forecast confirms that strong growth in data center
usage and cloud traffic are global trends, driven by our growing
desire to access personal and business content anywhere, on any
device," commented Doug Merritt, Cisco senior vice president,
Corporate Marketing. "When you couple this growth with projected
increases in connected devices and objects, the next-generation
Internet will be an essential component to enabling much greater
data center virtualization and a new world of interconnected
clouds."

Also among the reports key predictions are:

In 2011, North America generated the most cloud traffic (261
exabytes annually); followed by Asia Pacific; (216 exabytes
annually); and Western Europe (156 exabytes annually).

In 2011, North America had the most cloud workloads (8.1
million, or 38 percent of the global cloud workloads); followed by
Asia Pacific, which had 6.7 million, or 32 percent of the global
workloads in 2011.

In North America, traditional data center workloads will
actually decline from 2011 to 2016 (from 18.3 million in 2011 to
17.4 million in 2016), falling to a negative 1 percent CAGR.